


Tell me on a Sunday

by spellitwithyourpeas



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-28 04:34:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8432047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spellitwithyourpeas/pseuds/spellitwithyourpeas
Summary: For @C-Sand "She glanced out the window at the fire escape, ignoring the fading sense of disappointment when she didn’t see Frank’s shadow emerge from the stoop. Karen opened the window nevertheless, and breathed in the autumn air.His presence lingered like the ghost he wanted to become. It had been a few weeks now since he’d last shown up at her door, beaten and dripping blood. "





	

**Author's Note:**

> Not very Halloween-y but sorta Fall related :)

It was a Sunday morning when life threw her a curveball. Sundays were sacred in Karen’s mind, and not in the religious sense. Sundays were for her morning runs with Trish, for long showers, deep cleaning the apartment before settling in for the day and doing her absolute best to leave work well alone.

If life were a book, this would be a page she dog eared with the intention of revisiting in moments of disbelief.

Her days were still restless and long. Crime still raged on. The nights still ran red with the blood of drug runners and rapists. Her work didn’t stop. But the past few months had been peaceful. As peaceful as Hell’s Kitchen could get, that is. Fisk was dead. His throne was empty and unclaimed, though it wasn’t for lack of trying.

That morning they ran five miles and her breath was still ragged when she stepped into her apartment to find a folder slid under her door.

In a recognizable scrawl, the words _These are the last copies_ sent her mind spinning.

Karen picked up it up and set it on her kitchen table before getting a glass of water and kicking off her shoes. She glanced out the window at the fire escape, ignoring the fading sense of disappointment when she didn’t see Frank’s shadow emerge from the stoop. Karen opened the window nevertheless, and breathed in the autumn air.

His presence lingered like the ghost he wanted to become. It had been a few weeks now since he’d last shown up at her door, beaten and dripping blood. She supposed it was some small feat that he came to her, no pleading on her part necessary.

With few words, he sat quietly while she tended the wounds he could have easily cared for. That fact meant something to her.

It must have meant something to him too.

Only when she had showered and dressed did she return to the file on her table. Karen took a deep breath before opening it.

She gasped and a sob hitched in her throat when she saw the face of her brother staring back at her, a bloody pulp. The image was faded, but it wasn’t the first time she’d seen it’s brutality. Karen swallowed hard, flipping the picture over before moving through the rest of the files. A nervous flutter rose within her and her hands shook as her past unraveled before her eyes-gruesome and unburied.

She sat in silence.

So this was how he’d been staying busy in his absence. He knew she’d be out this morning when he slipped the folder under her door, like it was something of no consequence. But this was everything she had left behind. Everything she had shoved down and left to rot and here he was, digging it up and leaving it on her doorstep.

No warning. Nothing, but a sticky note.

Karen shut the file, tracing the word _last_ on the note before she dialed his number.

“You’re a bastard, Frank.” She hated that her voice still sounded hoarse from her tears.

“You’re just realizing that?” It was cold and far away, but not far enough for her to give in.

“You think you can just drop something like this off and walk away?” She hissed.

“A little gratitude would-,”

She interrupted, her words harsh and commanding, “No. Don’t act like I’m supposed to thank you. I didn’t ask you to go digging. I didn’t ask for this.”

Silence followed and she wondered if in her anger, she had missed the click as he hung up, but he spoke once again, quiet.

“You didn’t have to ask. It was always there, Karen. Fisk is gone. This was the last piece.”

She closed her eyes, the fight leaving her. Underneath the anger, some part of her was beginning to understand, “Last piece to what?”

Frank sighed.

“Piece to what, Frank?” Karen spoke through gritted teeth.

“Your freedom? Your fight? Hell, I don’t know, Karen.” His words came like a storm.

“Where are you?” She asked quietly. The distance was unrelenting and she was sick of it.

“Not in the city.”

 “Feel like a walk in the woods?”

She wondered if he could hear the hope in her voice. 

“If I say no, would it really make a difference?”

“No, so you might as well say yes.”

It was a yes.

 She hung up and took the file, slipping it into her bag. Forty minutes later she was parking her car on the side of the road nearby a trail.

She headed in the opposite direction, up a route that hadn’t been walked on enough to bear a path. The last time she’d trekked this way was to pick up Max. But that had been in the heat of summer, and now fall reigned in yellow and orange hues. Karen admired the brilliant colors and took comfort in the crunch of the forest floor beneath her boots.

He had been trying to return a favor. Trying to grant her peace. He knew what Fisk’s death meant to her, she didn’t know what he had seen to think there was something more, something carving her out from the inside.

He was sitting outside, on the porch of the shack hidden among the trees. Frank straightened at her approach.

He looked good, like he hadn’t been beating the shit out of criminals the night before. Karen greeted him with a soft smile and quiet hello. He looked weary with his hands dug deep in his pockets. Frank stood and they started to walk deeper into the woods.

The words escaped her. He was here in front of her, at her insistence, and she was speechless. Frank glanced over at her with a furrowed brow, before letting the words slip out.

“I’m sorry if it hurt you.”

Karen tore her gaze up from the leaves she’d been kicking mindlessly out of her way. He looked uncomfortable. Like he’d revealed too much.

It wasn’t the first time he’d apologized to her. The first was when he showed up with supplies in hand to fix her bullet ridden wall. The second was the cup of coffee and bagel left on her kitchen table after a long night. The third was a name, a source she had been after for a long time.

The fourth was the feather light touch of his finger over her brow, testing the edges of a bruise.

_“I should have been there. I wasn’t fast enough.”_

_“I don’t expect you to be there to fight all my battles Frank.”_

_He avoided her gaze when he pressed the bag of frozen peas back to her temple and repeated his words._

_“I should have been there.”_

Karen brushed the memory aside, “It surprised me, Frank. Nobody knows and I-,” The images flooded back in cruel succession. She felt his gaze on her and somehow it steadied her. She shrugged, “I’ve learned to manage over the years.”

His smile was wry, “That what you call it?”

She stopped and stared.

Frank rolled his eye, “You think I didn’t notice the nightmares, even after Fisk? You know, I always thought it was your work that ran you down so hard, but that wasn’t it was it?”

He took her glare as an answer.

“You know, you put up with a lot of other people’s shit.” Frank’s laugh is humorless, “Always trying to see the good in people and all that bullshit.”

Her flinch didn’t go unnoticed, but he didn’t pause, “Maybe you should start with yourself. The guilt will kill you.” He dug his hands deeper into his pockets and looked at her wavering gaze, “Maybe it already is.”

She shivered, her voice was hoarse, “So you forced my hand?”

He shifted his weight, gathering his thoughts. “No, I’m giving you a choice. It’s all there and it’s all yours. Do whatever the hell you want with it.”

 “What would you do?”

“Burn it.”

There was no hesitation in his answer.

Karen remembered the sick feeling that raced through her when she had learned all those months back that Frank Castle’s house had been burned to the ground. Gone were the scattered toys and the drawings on the wall. Walking through his home had felt like walking through a movie that had been paused. But it wasn’t a movie, it was a memory. And that home was nothing more than rubble and an empty lot.

The memory? That wasn’t for her to say. He didn’t speak of them often as often anymore.

It had taken her three years for reality to sink in. Her brother was gone. A missing place at the dinner table, his name caught in her throat, and the overwhelming guilt at the fact that he was never going to come back. Her family would never be normal again. 

That folder? With all the horror tucked inside. It was hers to destroy and hers to forget.

 _The last copies._ How he had gotten them? She didn’t know and for once she didn’t care.

“You got a lighter?”

Frank flashed a rare smile, “Do I have a lighter? Jesus Ma’am.” He shook his head.

Thirty minutes later they sat on the steps, ignoring the each other’s warmth as they sat close.

The flames crackled in the small fire pit in front of them. Karen’s cheeks were flushed from the proximity. She stared deeply into the flickering colors as the edges of the files coiled and folded into ash before her eyes.

It was done.

He’d said these were the last copies and she believed him. She knew he had a hell of a source, someone who could get into places she could never dream of. The physical copies were fading in front of her, and she didn’t doubt that whatever trace of the incident-coded and captured , rotting on some police database....

She didn’t doubt that the evidence had vanished one night as if it had never been entered. Of course, it helped that the officer who’d opened the report died years ago, after the case had started to run cold.

The relief she felt was like the slow release of pressure. Little by little her breath came easy and something within her unwound itself.

She felt a tear trail down her cheek and brushed it aside without a word. How many people like her had this chance? A fresh start, the past dead and buried once and for all.

Few were so lucky.

Glancing down at her steady hands, she steeled herself, “Thank you Frank.” Her voice pitched low.

Karen expected him to give a rumbling hum of acknowledgment, maybe a reserved “you’re welcome” or “no need to thank me, Ma’am”.

His soft response, almost a whisper, uprooted her.

“It’s all that I can give you.”

He sat with his confession in quiet contentment.

And suddenly Karen felt like she was back in the prison with him. His hands cuffed to the table.

_“Look Frank… I can’t judge you.”_

The moment held that same kind of quiet. The vulnerability, as strange as the concept was, it had never been a rare thing with him. The honesty was woven in with the bruises. For all his brutality, there was truth in his fight.

But it was a striking thing, and he left her feeling burned.

They had been wavering on the edge of something for too long. And now it felt like he was shutting a door she never wanted to close.

_“That’s not true”_

_“I’ll take whatever you can give me”_

_“I want this”_

_I want you._

For a moment, her body almost betrayed her by closing the sliver of a gap between them, as the remnants of his words hung heavy in the air.

He wouldn’t repeat them and she wouldn’t ask him to.

It wasn’t a day for dreams and she wondered if he heard it in her voice…the unequivocal sound of resignation.

When she spoke, the words tugged like a suture through skin.

“I know.”

Frank glanced over at her. He saw her nod after she spoke and her attempt at an understanding smile. And Goddamn, if it didn’t make his heart hurt in a way he didn’t think was possible anymore.

But that’s what she did. She walked with him through the dark, her eyes trained ahead at the fading light, her hand open in an offering.

Maybe one day he’d take it.

They sat quietly, as the sun set and the flames died. When there was nothing but ash and smoke, Karen stood.

“I should go.”

Her words were whispered as she shouldered her purse.

Frank studied his callused fingers, “Yeah. Yeah, you should.” 

Karen nodded and turned to go, but then he caught her gaze. His eyes were clear, not haunted by regrets of the past.

 Tonight, clarity held fast.

“I’ll always be there, alright?”

And for a moment, she thought he would falter. Perhaps duck his head and hide with downcast eyes. Maybe mumble a few other words to cover his tracks.

But he met her eyes with that quiet intensity that always left her feeling exposed.

“I owe you that much.”

Frank spoke softly and in a slow drawl. He was waiting, gauging her response. The surprise in her expression wasn’t in the words themselves, how could she doubt them?

He didn’t flinch when she traced a finger along his jaw.

“I know that too Frank.”

And there was more compassion in her tone than he knew what to do with and he cleared his throat. Her smile was genuine as recognized the moment was over and she withdrew her touch and started to walk away before she softly called back over her shoulder,

 “I’ll be seeing you, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

It was as good a goodbye as any, but a promise she knew he would keep.

 

**Author's Note:**

> The line "It's all that I can give you." Comes from the movie "The Village"


End file.
